Market Demand versus Technological Development: the Future of Chemical Engineering

Abstract In today’s economy, Chemical Engineering must respond to the changing needs of the chemical process industry in order to meet market demands. The evolution of chemical engineering is necessary to remain competitive in global trade. The ability of chemical engineering to cope with scientific and technological problems is addressed in this paper. Chemical Engineering is vital for sustainability: to satisfy both the market requirements for specific end-use properties of products and the social and environmental constraints of industrial-scale processes. A multidisciplinary, multiscale approach to chemical engineering is evolving due to breakthroughs in molecular modelling, scientific instrumentation and related signal processing and powerful computational tools. The future of chemical engineering can be summarized by four main objectives: (1) Increase productivity and selectivity through intensification of intelligent operations and a multiscale approach to process control; (2) Design novel equipment based on scientific principles and new production methods: process intensification; (3) Extend chemical engineering methodology to product design and product focussed processing using the 3P Engineering “molecular Processes-Product-Process” approach; (4) Implement multiscale application of computational chemical engineering modelling and simulation to real-life situations from the molecular scale to the production scale.